Using social media with AS

I use social media. Actually, I use quite a lot of it – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and  MSN. Until recently, I was also clamped onto a couple of IRC channels.

I started using social media as part of my camouflage, way before I knew consciously that I even did that. I felt the need to fit in – my geek friends were all using IRC, and despite it feeling a very odd thing to do, I joined them.

Instant Messaging was a work thing – it was the defacto way to communicate in the office between people who weren’t sitting next to each other. So over the space of a couple of years, I got used to communicating with people via MSN and IRC. This was almost exclusively a work-time thing – I didn’t use computers much at home.

Over time my usage has morphed. Web 2.0 is here, and with it have come new and more “social” ways of interacting. First came LinkedIn, and then Facebook. More recently I’ve embraced Twitter. My reason for using these sites has changed a little too. I still use them as part of my camouflage – to make me appear more normal within my peer group. These days, however, I’ve also discovered the power of self expression via social media. I use Twitter in particular to express my thoughts. I comment on things I’ve read on the web, or things people have been talking about.

This perhaps shows how my use of social media is only a facsimile of how people normally use it.

I don’t use it in a very social way most of the time. I don’t add lots of applications to Facebook, nor do I throw snowballs or cows or give gifts to friends.  I don’t have a funwall. Now that I’ve built a peer-group at LinkedIn I no longer log in to keep it up to date. On Twitter, my updates are factual and stating opinion most of the time. My Twitter @replies are sparse and again usually state fact about things rather than being light, jokey, and, well, social.

What about IRC? Well, I recently decided to stop using it. With my daily use of Twitter and to a lesser extent Facebook, I found IRC just too much. I also found it never fitted my way of interacting very well. I felt compelled to scroll back and read what people had written whilst I was away. I needed to know the story – what people had been doing and saying. That was just too much of a burden. I used to justify my use of IRC with the rare times that I used it to actually interact with people rather than being the silent lurker. This was usually to ask a question of someone in particular and IRC wasn’t good at this mode of interaction. If the person wasn’t present, then they may or may not see my question when they returned, depending on much traffic there had been on the channel since. If they did see and then replied, I may or may not have seen their reply, for the same reason. Twitter and to a lesser extent Facebook both handle this non-real-time style of disjoint conversation far better and more reliably.

I quietly and without fuss dropped off my usual IRC channels a few weeks ago. I’ve had a couple of pangs of neediness for it in my more anxious moments, but I have to say that on the whole I’m not missing it.

Social media can be used by someone with AS.

Just don’t expect someone with AS to use it in the way you would use it.

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